Google has just unveiled its Chrome OS operating system during a press event at the company's headquarters, and it's pretty much exactly what we expected it to be: a streamlined Linux kernel booting straight into the Chrome web browser. The code is available starting today.

You do realize sleep/resume could just as easily be implemented on Chrome OS as anything else... And it could be implemented so that if you switched computers you could resume your last session on a different machine. Try that with a conventional OS. "

Sleep/resume would be pointless on ChromeOS. Firstly you would disable the builtin security. Secondly, there's absolutely no point in restoring the data which was in memory. All data is in the cloud already!. Finally I doubt that it would actually speed up the boot process.

People's inability to fathom how far this paradigm can actually go amazes me...

Yes thinclients can have interesting applications, ChromeOS is a crippled thinclient, which can only connect to webservices.

"But more importantly I could care less about instant boot if it means booting into a desktop that requires internet access.

Then stick with your existing desktop/whatever. It isn't going anywhere anytime soon. But many people (including me) really don't see the point of even using a computer without the internet.

ChromeOS has to be one of the most overhyped operating systems of all time. The new graphics stack turned out to be a rumor.

It's a Linux distro that locks you into the browser. Amazing!

Everyone says the next big thing is overhyped prior to it becoming the next big thing... We'll see. And
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But the thing is browser only linux distros have been around longer than ChromeOS. What Google is doing here is nothing exceptionally new, but somehow the same people who were previously saying "who would ever want something like that" are now falling all over themselves on Googles "paradigm-shift".

PLEASE dont refer to it as a linux distro - it is NOT a linux distro. The Linux kernel is an implementation detail, it could just as easily be run on top of BSD or something completely custom built. It has no application binary interface - it is an OS designed to run a browser stack and that is all it runs. I'm not trying to dis Linux by saying that either, Linux happens to be the best available option. But an OS that only runs a browser only needs to care about running the browser - the stuff under the hood is subject to change. As time goes by I predict the stuff under the hood WILL change - probably drastically. Google will hack it down to the bare minimum as they figure out which parts they can whittle away... X is a convenient starting point for a graphics stack - by not committing their ABI to it they can hack it off at will.